I'm not convinced that consumers care if their laptop has easily replaceable parts. Consumers definitely like thin laptops though, which is at odds with repairability in most cases.
1. Things like the new MBP keyboard are objectively worse than the old keyboard in terms of user experience. This might have saved half a millimeter in height of a closed laptop. What's more, repair costs are _insane_. Even after a year of using this I still prefer the old keyboard.
2. They've added features that serve little more purpose than raising the ASP of MBPs. Top of that list is the touch bar. I consider the 2011-14 Macbook Air to be the pinnacle of Macbook hardware. Decent ports, good form factor, decent CPU (by comparison the 12" Macbook IMHO makes too much sacrifices to the altar of thinness) and, best of all, a great price. The fact that you could buy such a great machine for <$1500 was amazing to the point that I didn't really care what happened to it. I'd just buy another one if it died or I lost it. That made me more comfortable buying it and using it wherever.
The problem is that consumers won't see the downside of this until they've been around long enough to start failing outside of warranty and then outside of AppleCare. At that point paying $500+ (or whatever it is; I don't know the specific number) just to repair a keyboard is going to be pretty hard to swallow.
I really like the mil-spec ruggedized laptops. I look down a row of those, and it really strikes me how they're all the same size, they're covered in ports (behind little gasket-protected doors), and they are so unapologetic about size and weight that they have sturdy carry handles attached.
So what I really want most is a standardized form factor. Then my concern is for the closely related concepts of power, cooling, and heat dissipation. My Third choice would be 1920x1080 display resolution or better. After that, battery life. If you're designing your laptop to be too thin and light to accommodate a standard TRS audio mini-jack, you're not designing for me.
The other thing lappie makers are doing is touch screens, which are just awkward on a laptop, and usually unusable in a docking station anyway. Never mind about turning the function key row into a touchscreen.
I care about weight. A lot. Because I travel.
People on HN like to say a particular laptop is "light enough." Sure, if that's all your carrying. But if you have a bag or briefcase full of other things like documents, every ounce counts.
Even classified documents can be shipped. There's really no reason I can imagine for anyone to be hand-carrying paper documents in the passenger compartment of an airplane in 2018, outside of a diplomatic pouch. And in that case, the laptop probably has to be disposable anyway.
Um, some of us still use (gasp) paper notebooks and pens. Imagine that! (I'll stop using them when you give me something with comparable power consumption and handwriting latency).
Besides that, in my bag you'll find a Fuji X100 camera, a Polaroid Snap, a (yes, paper) passport, a wallet, a couple of chargers, a cell phone, some pens, allergy pills, etc.
All of that has weight.
As for shipping - one point of bringing something on a plane is that you can use it on the plane.
Anyway, the point is - weight matters. There are things other than the laptop that a lot of people carry when traveling - be it personal or business travel.
Which of these events do you think is more likely for the typical user?
This is actually why the fragile keyboard on the latest MacBook Pros is such a problem. It compromises durability in a part of the laptop that is actually very important.
Give me maintainable laptops, not throwaway ones, for the love of...
I spilled soda pop on my 2008 Macbook's keyboard and fried it. Fortunately, the computer still worked (I ended up carrying a USB keyboard in my bag as I was consulting on site, which was awkward, but at least I could do that without being stuck without a computer for a few days). I ordered a second hand replacement from OWC, and after watching a video, I had the keyboard replaced in less than an hour.
On a laptop I don't really think so. An extended warranty runs about 3 years and most Macs I've had have lasted about 5. At that point I would just rather get a new computer anyway than bother sprucing up an old one.
I did have one computer fry in about 3 years because of a logic board issue, which pissed me off royally. But in the grand scheme of things, the money I would have saved by having a user replaceable GPU vs. just upgrading the thing 2 years before I was ready to doesn't amount to very much. If I was very money constrained it would definitely be more of an issue, but that's never really been Apple's target market.
That depends on whether you got a laptop with a real processor or a low power processor. A 2011 15" MBP with a quad core i7 holds up pretty well even today in terms of CPU performance.
Isn’t the point here that it’s no longer so good to replace a 5-year-old Mac?
My MacBook Air is about 5 years old now, and yes, the USB ports and some keys on the keyboard are becoming unreliable, and the power cable has frayed despite a protector, but none of the current models are tempting enough to make me want to upgrade the way I used to.
There's a comic and I can't find it right now where a person is lamenting the fact that they have no backups while their computer is not booting.
Then the computer works and they exclaim that "thank god I don't need to do any of that", it's funny because it's quite relatable to a lot of people.
Make a thin MacBook, sure. Then make a proper MacBook pro and make it about the hardware and not beauty. I believe there is actually a market for it.
As for storage, I'd be crazy not to keep all important files on a backed-up RAID array. It's a professional tool, after all.
(and I keep my music on an off-site-backed-up RAID array)
"Apple REFUSED to fix our iMac pro" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-NU7yOSElE
"The Apple Store Genius Bar broke my $5000 iMac pro" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG_NRcy5mxU
I side with Apple in the Linux Tech Tips issue, though. They're under no obligation to fix it after he broke it by intentionally violating the terms and conditions.
That's like saying that you're not sure consumers dislike the idea of falling victims to price gauging schemes or even being forced to scrap perfectly good hardware due to a minor issue with an otherwise perfectly modular component or the inability to upgrade low-performing hardware.
Anecdotally I'm aware of more than a few folks who replaced their bottom end PC/Windows laptop with a brand new machine because it was supplied with far too little memory, but hit a £399 or £499 price point, and they installed one too many bits of crap. So they spend another £499 on another too lightly specced laptop when £40 doubling memory would have fixed all their issues. PC makers have always been happy to sell machines with barely enough RAM to reach the desktop let alone run or install anything.
A lot of consumers don't know what they're buying, how much memory Windows needs, how to upgrade even when possible, or how to uninstall things they no longer need (eg iTunes after they switched to Android, Massive HP drivers remaining when now running an Epson printer and vice versa). Helpful in-store sales people don't help with this.
Most of us on HN however would prefer to buy the least standard memory/SSD possible and immediately bump it at Crucial or some such for a quarter of Dell, Lenovo or Apple's price.